It’s not often that botanists get rock-star treatment. After all, to most people their work probably seems as exciting as watching moss grow.
But Tom Ranker, head of the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Botany Department, and his colleagues were greeted like celebrities when they recently visited Tanna, an island that is part of the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, to collect samples for his research.
"When we showed up at a village, we had to come to their gathering place in the village, and they had to formally welcome us," he said. "The chief was there and he gave a speech, and then the guy who was in charge of our party gave a speech, and it was very formal. And they had to formally give us permission."
On another visit, villagers even performed a dance for them.
Ranker, one of the world’s foremost experts in ferns, is working to get colleagues similar acclaim. As the new president of the Botanical Society of America, he’s become the poster boy, or more accurately, the selfie of the group’s "Reclaim the Name" campaign, which has botanists coming out of the woodwork to announce what they do and how they do it.
The campaign started a few weeks ago at a Botanical Society meeting when one of the members asked, "How many of you describe yourself as a botanist when somebody asks what you do?"
"Just a few people out of 30 or 40 people in the room raised their hands," Ranker said. "We got to talking about that: Why do so many botanists not call themselves botanists anymore? Maybe we need to call more attention to that, that hey, it’s OK to call yourself a botanist."
The group started an online campaign on Facebook and Twitter asking botanists to post pictures of themselves holding a sign declaring "I am a botanist" and describing their work. Ranker, as president of the society, got things rolling by posting his own picture, which struck a nerve, or rather, a root.
"There have been many hundreds, in a very short time, from around the world, too, not just the BSA," Ranker said.
A recent Twitter search via #Iamabotanist — the hashtag created by Ranker —revealed tweets from botanists working in Portugal, Peru, Colombia, even a photo from Panama with a large group of people standing under a sign that says "Somos botanicos — We are botanists." The tweets included inspirational messages such as "Botany is the foundational science for a sustainable future" and "Save global botany!"
"We were all a little surprised at how big it got," Ranker said, "especially when people from around the world started posting and also a lot of people who are not members of the Botanical Society of America, just other botanists from around the world and from America who are not members."
Botany has become the poor stepchild of science in recent decades, according to Ranker. At many colleges and universities, botany departments have been merged into biology departments, and when botany professors have retired, they aren’t replaced by botanists, Ranker said.
A report by Botanic Garden Conservation International, a group devoted to supporting issues related to botany, said that since 1988 the number of undergraduate botany degrees has declined by half, and the number of graduate degrees is down 41 percent, while degrees in general biology increased 17 percent. More than half of the top 50 U.S. universities, rated according to funding, have dropped botany programs, and many have eliminated related courses, the report said.
"You can get a B.A. or B.S. in biology and never take a class that’s devoted to plants," Ranker said. "So you can have a degree in so-called biology, which is the study of life, and know nothing about plants. Whereas our focus is plants."
UH is now one of only a handful of major research universities left in the country with an independent botany department, Ranker said. The department has 16 faculty members, about 45 undergraduate students and another 35 graduate students.
UH is one of only two universities in the country to offer a degree in ethnobotany, which encompasses the cultural uses of plants. Ethnobotanists have been particularly well received among Pacific islanders, Ranker said.
"I learned that that’s really a hook to get them to allow us to collect their plants, by asking them how they use plants," he said. "And they’re happy to tell us."
Ranker, 62, is a specialist in plant systematics — the relationship of plants to one another — and plant evolution. He takes the plants he’s collected back to UH, extracts their DNA and compares them with similar samples held in a gene bank in an effort to trace their lineage and development.
Similar kinds of detective skills are involved in another project in which DNA from lumber found floating in local waters is being studied. The lumber was cut in a way that suggested it came from Japan, and the scientists believe it is debris from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011.
Ranker, who worked at UH in the late 1980s and came here permanently in 2008, became interested in botany as a college student studying civil engineering in California. He said he was given a good camera and "just started noticing plants by taking pictures of them."
"So this is a flower — what are all these parts?" Ranker recalled thinking. "And here comes a bee — what’s going on with that?"
To conduct his research, Ranker has traveled all over the Pacific Rim collecting samples from Costa Rica, Taiwan, Borneo and Vietnam.
While not quite the stuff of Hollywood archaeologist Indiana Jones, he’s had a few close calls. In southern Mexico his group got shot at while hiking onto land without permission. Another time, his passenger jet developed engine trouble over Central America and had to land in civil-war-ravaged Nicaragua.
"They loaded us up with armed guards and machine guns and put us up in the Sheraton hotel" in San Salvador, El Salvador, Ranker said. "I found out later that the Sheraton hotel was where two CIA agents had been gunned down."
While it still may not be hip to call yourself a botanist in social settings, it does help in getting a job. Botanists are in high demand in both the public and private sectors, with organizations such as the Nature Conservancy, the National Park Service, the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources and private consultants in need of botanists.
"The National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife (Service), they have a lot more plants to deal with than they have animals to deal with, and so a great number of people doing the conservation management in the field are plant people," said Don Drake, an associate professor of botany at UH.
With its isolated location and unique ecosystems, Hawaii is a haven for botanists, who not only have the opportunity to use their knowledge in a practical way, but can make significant scientific contributions as well. That differs sharply from the mainland, where many states have few endangered plant species left to study.
"Here we’ve got several hundred endangered species (362 threatened or endangered, according to the Hawaiian Botanical Forum website), and we know nothing about them other than their taxonomy (species classification). We don’t know anything about their biology," Drake said.
"Here a student can make a real contribution because there’s just not enough people to go around. To have folks plug into these problems is very helpful to both conservation and science."
